A Film Canon

 

 

In one of the most astute portraits of masculinity between the wars, Victor Fleming pairs down Rudyard Kipling's short story to a father-son romance, deflecting its wealth of maritime information into a series of spectacular sequences, which differ from those of Mutiny On The Bounty by virtue of their depiction of the relationship between ship and sea, rather than discrete parts of the ship. That this romance speaks to a wider social anxiety is evinced in the triangular relation between spoilt brat Harvey Cheyne (Freddie Batholomew), his tycoon father, and salt-of-the-earth fisherman Manuel (Spencer Tracy), who rescues him after he falls over the side of an ocean liner. Upon being reunited with his son, Mr. Cheyne's desire to identify himself with Manuel, who has become something of a surrogate father-figure, is offset by his profound identification with Harvey - and, specifically, with his lack of a father-figure - as if to suggest that the upper middle class, of which he is a fairly one-dimensional personification, suffers from a paternalistic debit; or, alternatively, from a lack of some elusive susbstance that such a figure might be expected to provide. Although this substance is variously associated with nature, the working classes and the non-American (Manuel is clownishly Portugese), it is eventually incorporated into religious iconography, and implicitly construed as an antitype of Christ's Passion - "My father, why have you forsaken me?" - transforming sentimentality into pathos, and angst into agony.